I don't need anyone to explain it to me because I know it very well. I just find it interesting that many who like to talk about deconstruction can't substantiate much of what they say. Very often it seems to me they simply make things up. Pretty cynical if you ask me. Skeptical, even. — Streetlight
I'm a stickler. Again, just one quote from Derrida about his supposed skepticism would be nice. — Streetlight
Can you explain in your own words what deconstruction theory is?I don't need anyone to explain it to me because I know it very well. I just find it interesting that many who like to talk about deconstruction can't substantiate much of what they say. Very often it seems to me they simply make things up. Pretty cynical if you ask me. Skeptical, even. — Streetlight
Skepticism is skepticism towards knowledge. This is actually what we throw doubt at whenever we are skeptical about a claim.The preconditions of skepticism are that there has to be an objective or 'true' world to be skeptical of? — Tom Storm
Skepticism is skepticism towards knowledge. This is actually what we throw doubt at whenever we are skeptical about a claim. — L'éléphant
It's quite in line with say, the Kantian emancipatory project which of course Derrida claims fidelity to. — Streetlight
Don't be rude.
— Jackson
I'm sorry, I can try again.
Your claim is false and a lie. — Streetlight
Tristan Tzara — 180 Proof
What does it do then? — Olivier5
If there is a single theme which draws together the otherwise disparate field of structuralist thought , it is the principle --first announced by Saussure-- that language is a differential network meaning. There is no self-evident or one-to-one link between 'signifier' and 'signified', the word as (spoken or written) vehicle and the concept it serves to evoke. Both are caught up in a play of distinctive features where differences in sound and sense are the only markers of meaning.
— Norris
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/saussure.htmlSaussure states that "in language there are only differences without positive terms" (LT 88). Signifiers (sound images) and signifieds (concepts/meanings) are not fixed and universal and do not simply reflect or represent prior categories (the world/ideas/forms): language articulates or makes such categories and concepts possible. Because there is no necessary or inherent relation between words and objects, the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (e.g., similar meanings correspond in practice rather than in some natural or essential way to different words across languages or across time as words change). Yet because the sign's structure is arbitrary, it is subject both to history and to a synchronic study of its relational function within a signifying system (la langue) that is not arbitrary but conventional and socially constructed. To explain a signifying action (individual utterance, speech act, parole) is therefore to relate it to the underlying system of norms (conventions/practices) that makes it possible: hence, a structural rather than a strictly causal explanation (synchronic rather than diachronic/historical).
Saussure offers an analogy between language and chess: "The respective value of the pieces depends on their position on the chessboard just as each linguistic term derives its value from its opposition to all the other terms. . . . Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others . . . .Signs function, then, not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position" (LT 82-86).
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The supposed union of sound-image (signifier's abstract form) and its signified, however, may still suggest that signs mediate or represent a world of phenomena and ideas via a system of differences (language/discourse, though the production of meaning via such relational differences also suggests that language is prior to thought, and that we apprehend or determine reality via language). But if we think of the sign as the possibility of distinguishing signifier from signified, then the structure of the sign can be understood as an effect of difference or "différance" rather than as something stable and unified. "Language works--gains meaning . . . through opposition [and] identity is a function of difference" (Jane Tompkins 736). Linguistic values/meanings depend upon their relations to other terms within particular frameworks/contexts.
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